Seagate Staff Victimized with Phishing E-mail, Discloses Numerous Tax Forms

An employee of Seagate who got one spear-phishing electronic mail, which appeared like one genuine in-house request about sending someone of the company W-2 tax forms regarding numerous present and former staff members, actually was victimized in an e-mail scam.

Arstechnica reports that the employee thought the e-mail message was really from chief executive officer Stephen Luczo who was asking for the 2015 W-2 documents related to the workers. Thus, wrongly thinking the electronic mail as genuine, the employee complied with the request, in fact, dispatching the information to some external electronic mail id.

On Sunday, Snapchat revealed an incident wherein somebody pretending to be the company's chief executive asked for staff payroll data. Instead of viewing the e-mail as fraudulent it was regarded to be an authentic request resulting in exposure of information on 700 employees.

Immediately when Seagate became aware, it told officials as also began dispatching notification letters meant for each and every affected party. An ex-Seagate employee who got the kind of letter sent the entire thing to Brian Krebs an ex-reporter of Washington Post who publicized the matter through his blog.

One spokesman for the firm told Krebs regarding the exposure of a massive number of employees' W-2 forms which however, didn't exceed 10,000. Softpedia.com posted this, March 7, 2016.

Now fraudsters have with them the W-2 documents whose information they can exploit for filing fake taxes of the employees while steal their refunds. Not irritating enough as it is to file tax documents; it's certainly more painful to have some other person complete the work using false details towards filching a huge refund. People already filing their returns of present year maybe secured for the moment, however, with thousands of staff members impacted, a lot may quickly be trying to resolve the after-effects.

When February 2016 started, somebody as well attempted at obtaining E-filing PINs related to 464K taxpayers in USA, effectively acquiring 101K PINs that could've gotten utilized within fake tax-returns.

And though not commenting on how many people got impacted, Seagate, nevertheless, has dispatched notifications in all their addresses, while offering an Experian's ProtectMyID membership for 2-yrs too.

» SPAMfighter News - 3/14/2016